Stonemouth (14 page)

She shrugs, looks like she’s about to lift her camera again but then doesn’t. She smiles. God, that’s a pretty face. Then the smile’s gone again. She purses her lips, fiddles with the camera once more. She’s still walking backwards. ‘You want me to fix up a meeting between you and Ellie?’ she asks.

‘What are we? Mafia crime lords?’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, but do you?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I tell her. Of course I want to see Ellie, but involving Grier doesn’t seem like so great an idea.

‘I could,’ she tells me. ‘If you want me to.’

I nod, indicating behind her. ‘You’re really confident you’re not just about to fall over a tree trunk, or’ – I lean out to one side, looking around her – ‘a big orange buoy sitting in its own little pool of water?’

Grier is not fooled. ‘Yuss,’ she says, eyelids fluttering, ‘I am, amn’t I?’

I
scrunch my face up slowly, knitting my brows, narrowing my eyes and stretching my mouth out tight to either side, as though afraid to watch what is about to happen, but she still doesn’t turn round.

We walk like this for a few more moments. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve memorised every bit of wrecked tree on this beach,’ I tell her.

She shrugs, grins, keeps walking backwards.

‘Seriously,’ I say, glancing round behind her again and using one hand to indicate she should head slightly to the right. ‘You could really hurt yourself if you fell over one of these big ones with the branches or the roots sticking out all over the place.’

She still looks unperturbed, but after a few more paces turns the camera on, takes off the lens cap, rests the lens on her shoulder, pointing behind, and clicks.

‘That’s cheating,’ I tell her as she brings the camera forward to look at the photo she’s just taken.

‘Yup,’ she says. She turns, swings forward, takes my arm again.

‘How is Ellie anyway?’

‘She is okay anyway,’ Grier tells me as we reach the forest car park. She walks up to a BMW X5 and plips it open.

‘This thing your dad’s?’ I ask. It’s a bit bling.

Grier shrugs. ‘Dunno. Family fleet car, kinda.’

Her camera goes into a custom bag with various other lenses and photo paraphernalia. My phone vibrated a minute ago to let me know it’s back online and has texts and missed calls. A text from Dad says
ARRANGED YOU CAN GO SEE MIKE MAC THIS AFT
. He isn’t really shouting; his texts always come like that. I suppose I’d better go; visiting Don without seeing Mike Mac probably breaks some protocols or something.

Grier takes off her hat, flings it into the back seat and ruffles her hair, which is short and fair and looks natural. I wonder when that happened. This is the first time in a decade I’ve seen her when her
hair hasn’t been dyed, or styled to look like Ellie’s. She looks sort of boyish, but good.

Then she looks at me with one of those sudden pause-looks Grier’s been using since she was about thirteen. It’s the sort of look that makes you think,
Did I say something wrong?
or,
Has she just thought of something really disturbing?

‘I’m going to see Grandpa,’ she tells me, ‘want to come?’

‘Um, where is he?’

‘Geddon’s,’ she says. ‘Lying in state.’

Geddon’s is the oldest funeral company in town. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have guessed his body would be there.

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘Yeah, I’d – okay.’

We bounce and wobble over tree roots to the strip of tarmac through the forest that leads to the main road.

I met Joe when I was walking in the hills, before I got to know the rest of the adult Murstons, before I ever talked to Ellie beyond the odd, grunted, embarrassed hi when our paths crossed, infrequently.

Joe must have been in his seventies then; he was one of those thick-bodied men who’s obviously been fit and hard all his life, and who still has a sort of dense-looking frame even in old age. He was stiff with arthritis and he carried his barrel chest and sizeable belly before him like a backpack worn the wrong way round. He always had an old-fashioned wooden walking stick with him; mostly he used it to poke at interesting things he found lying on the ground, and to thrash at nettles. He said he’d fallen into a load of nettles when he’d been a bairn, and still held a grudge. I don’t know; he might have been joking.

Anyway, he liked to walk his pair of fat, slow, elderly Border collies up in the same hills and forest I tended to wander around in, though the collies kind of just plodded along behind him and never ran about or chased after things. Generally they looked as though they’d much rather be curled up on a rug in front of a fire or in a patch of sunlight in the house.

I
was sixteen and I’d recently bought a moped, like just about every boy in my class who could afford to and hadn’t been forbidden by their parents. Scared myself on it a couple of times; never told Mum and Dad. Once I got over the novelty of whirling through the local wee roads and lanes, and making an expedition down the old coast road to Aberdeen, I used it mostly for heading for the hills and then going walking.

I liked hill walking because it got you away from everything and everybody and it was healthier than being on the bike. Other kids in my class were already getting gym memberships for birthdays and Xmas but I thought being out in the open air was less regimented, less controlled. Years later, in London, I held out for nearly two years before I joined a gym, and gave in then purely because it was almost the only way to stay fit without choking on traffic fumes.

I’d just struggled the hard, steep way up to the top of a wee hill in the forests above Easter Pilter when I first bumped into Joe in what must have been the summer of ’01; he’d come up the easy way and was sitting taking the sun with his back against the summit cairn, the two still-panting collies lying flopped round his feet. He wore baggy, worn corduroy trousers somewhere between dark green and brown and an even baggier green jumper with a hole in one elbow. The dogs looked up at me with milky eyes but didn’t raise their heads off their feet.

‘Mornin,’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’ I said.

Usually I avoided other people in the hills, where I could, without making it obvious. As I had just got to the top of the steep grass-and-boulder slope, though, there was nowhere else to go, and anyway I needed to catch my breath. I stood facing away from him, looking at the view. Beyond the treed ridges and tumbled, grassy hills near by, Stonemouth was just visible to the east, the sea a blue-grey presence beyond.

‘Bonny, eh?’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’
I said. Then I felt I was being too monosyllabic, like some rubbish teenager. ‘Yeah, it is bonny, isn’t it?’

‘You’re a Toun boy, aye?’ he asked.

I turned and looked at him. ‘Aye,’ I said.

‘Accent,’ he said, tapping a large, round and quite red nose. Not that I thought I’d looked surprised or anything.

‘Yourself ?’ I asked.

‘Aye. Frae so fur back ah doot yir faither wiz burn.’

From so far back he doubted my father had been born. Joe certainly talked like an old geezer, though, as I learned, he only really put it on like that when he was playing up to some image of age or parochialism he wanted to poke fun at.

I sort of laughed.

‘Ye no stoapin?’ he asked.

‘Um, no,’ I said. He didn’t look like a weirdo or a paedophile or anything, and even if he was I’d be able to outrun him, but I just felt uncomfortable. ‘Well, better be going,’ I said.

Joe nodded. ‘Wouldne want tae keep ye,’ he said. ‘Mind how ye go, now.’

‘Aye. Nice to meet you,’ I said. Though this wasn’t really true. I walked off, the easy way. I felt vaguely annoyed with myself, though I wasn’t sure why. Awkward meeting.

As I started to head home, I took a forest track a bit too fast on my moped, whacked the sump or something and the bike bled a trickle of oil onto the narrow single-track back to the main road. I found out about the wee trickle of oil when I took a corner – not going fast at all – and the rear wheel just seemed to go out from under the bike. I skidded, tipped onto the tarmac and was scraped across the surface, with the bike pirouetting alongside, until I hit the grass and pine-needle verge and came to a stop. The bike lay ticking beside me, bleeding oil.

I got up, shaking a bit. Ripped my good jeans. Torn my right boot above the ankle. Ripped the stuffing out of my parka. Helmet looked a bit scraped. No blood or broken bones, though. I went for my
phone but it had been in a pocket ripped open by my slide along the road. I found it on the grass, but the screen was dead and it wasn’t even powering up.

I was still wondering what to do and how exactly to break this to my mum and dad when an ancient blue Volvo estate came humming along the road. It drew to a stop and it was the same old guy. The two collies, slightly livelier now, were standing panting in the rear, looking at me through their cloudy eyes, moderately interested. The old guy leaned over, wound the window down.

‘Ye have a spill, son, aye?’

‘Aye.’

He shooed the collies to one side and helped me manhandle the bike into the back of the estate. Actually I helped him; he was stronger than me. The collies didn’t appreciate sharing their space with the now dry-sumped bike, but settled down when they realised a few whines and some hangdog looks weren’t going to change matters. The old guy offered his hand as we were about to leave.

‘Joe,’ he said, as we shook.

‘Stewart.’

‘Fine Scoatish name. Whereaboots in the Toun ye wantin?’

‘Ormiston’s Garage, I suppose.’ Not much point taking the bike home. I tried my phone again. Still broken.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me a big, slightly comical-looking mobile as we drove off. ‘You can give them a call.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. It was one of those ultra-basic mobiles made just for old people: big buttons, clearly marked. ‘Mind if I look in your numbers?’

‘Ye no know the number?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to add the
of course not
. Joe tutted, looked amused.

In the end I used directory enquiries.

The bike was a write-off and I wasn’t allowed a new one, not if I wanted to live at home for the next couple of years, before I’d be going to university.

I
still had my old mountain bike so I sometimes took that to the nearest forests and hills, though my horizons had definitely shrunk. Joe would ring up some days and offer me a lift to the hills whenever he was heading that way himself. Usually I accepted. He wasn’t always going walking himself, just passing that way, and even when he was taking the dogs for a walk he always encouraged me to head off by myself and just be back at the car by an arranged time.

One day there was only one collie to walk, then, a few months later, none at all. I told him he ought to get new ones, but he said he’d owned too many by now. I didn’t understand, and told him so. He just shrugged and said, ‘Aye, well.’ This was, in retrospect, a lot better than telling me I would understand one day.

Mum and Dad got me a car – a hopelessly underpowered and terribly safe VW Polo – the day I turned seventeen. I passed my test when I was a month older and suddenly I had my freedom again. By then I knew Joe was Joe Murston, father of Donald, and I’d visited the family house on the hill to see him, rather than Callum. It felt more of a duty, to be honest, and the fact that I always stood a chance of bumping into Ellie when I went to see him was a long way from being an irrelevant part of the equation, but I always knew I’d miss him when he went.

I stand in the funeral parlour, looking at him. It’s quiet and cool in here and it smells of lilies: a too-sweet, cloying smell. Old man Murston lies, dressed in a dark, old-fashioned suit, in a flamboyant-looking open casket I suspect he’d have hated. I don’t think I ever saw him wear a tie before. One of those neck things, sometimes; a cravat. His plump face looks like it’s made from shiny plastic and his mouth is wrong: too tight and thin. His body, though still big, looks shrunken somehow, as if the air’s been let out of it.

I’m trying hard to remember some pearls of wisdom Joe might have imparted during our walks together, some deeply meaningful I-think-we’ve-all-learned-something-here-today revelation that I owe to him, but I’m failing.

Mostly
we talked about nothing much, or about how it was in the old days: steam trains, having to pay the doctor in the time before the NHS, being able to walk across the river on the decks of trawlers, the war – he was on the farm throughout, producing food for the home front; I got the impression some fun had been had with Land Girls – and nature stuff. Joe taught me a lot of names for trees and birds and animals, but they were the old names, names already slipping from common use, and not really that much help. If a girl said, ‘Is that a cuckoo?’ and you said, ‘Naw, quine, yon’s a gowk,’ you’d generally be looked at aghast, like you were talking a foreign language. Which you kind of were.

Fankle. He taught me a few useful, or at least good words, like fankle. Fankle is more or less a straight synonym of tangle, but it sounds better somehow. Particularly as applied to a fishing line that’s got itself into a terrible, un-sort-outable mess, the level of shambles so extreme all you can really do is take a knife to it and throw it away. That’s a fankle. Applies to lives too, obviously, though the knife approach usually only makes things worse.